Description

First time I ran a print on a alpha, I noticed that the display was reading a filament run out but cura was still sending it commands and it was still printing. The print was stopped and resent, this time no run out filament was detected. I noticed this is big because the connecter with the green wire is hooked up to the filament going to the E2 extruder.

@west Sounds about right but the main issue I saw was it did not matter what extruder each filament sensor was connected too, it would report a fillament run out message the first time it was ran and they it wouldn't after the print was restarted. It did it on both extruders

@oliver I was told the run out detection needs an active print timer to function properly. I was not able to detect a run out on the CB test stand until I put an M75 in. Abort/restart of prints is functionality known to have problems currently, so it may not have reset the print timer upon restarting the print which could be responsible for:

it would report a fillament run out message the first time it was ran and they it wouldn't after the print was restarted

But @west is correct that the reason the filament run out was triggered was because of the improper connections.

@west I think this ticket can be closed as invalid as the actual issues are being tracked through other tickets
See T4883 for OHAI concerns regarding improper connection of the filament sensorT4446 for filament run out pause/resume issues

Perhaps I'm not understanding something about the filament sensor or I'm not being clear enough on my problem.

If a tube is connected to the wrong extruder it will detect a filament run out because as soon as it detects the sensor is not moving while its printing because its connected to the non-active extruder it will detect a false filament run out. My problem was that no matter what extruder a tube was connected to it would detect a run out on the first print job and then continue with the print. This happened after switching the tubes, if it was detecting a filament run out than at one point the print jobs should have always failed unless my understanding is not correct.

I was able to see motion detected in the console, but when it stops detecting motion it did not start counting down.

How long did you wait? The countdown only happens at the end of a segment, that is, at the end of a linear motion. If your head is moving across the bed extruding a long line, it will not count down until the end of that move.

I had generated a circle gcode in CuraLE and increased all of the extrusion moves (in an attempt to trigger the filament run out sooner) so that each extrusion move was about 1mm. I then inserted that section of gcode to the rest of my testing gcode and ran the print. Arriving at that section of code, filament run out data started coming through the console. It was reporting motion detected so I stopped the encoder wheel on the test unit, it then stopped reporting motion detected, but did not count down. I held this state for at least 20 of these moves. Run out distance at the time was set to 14mm.

@logan: Could you try with .54 or later? I think what you were seeing is that in earlier FW versions, once a runout was detected, the runout condition once triggered, would inhibit any further motion from being detected until the condition was cleared. Since there was no way to clear that condition from the serial console, the runout sensor would work only once. In .54 I changed it so the run-out condition is immediately reset after a message is printed on the serial console.

@marcio Yes, I can try again once we make a determination on a path forward for T3694 but I'd like to not spend time on that function of the test stand if we can avoid using it. In summary I think it adds too much time and complexity to the test.

With the latest firmwares, to my knowledge there hasnt been any issue reading a working sensor board. If anything false positives are more of an issue at this point in time, so i am closing this ticket. Also for the test stand, the pin states addition to the firmware ( in fw .73) will be a useful tool for determining the status of the filament sensor.